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I walked home from Millennium Park last night, after the Modern Ball, which celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Architecture & Design Society. And I noticed, sprouting on the Avenue,along with the yellow tulips and daffodils in the planters,

sidewalk signs that say "City Information."

They're in the style of the Robert Stern-designed bus shelters that started sprouting in Chicago a few years back. Those were controversial for putting brightly lit ads on our city streets. These new intrusions on our streets are a single panel, of advertisements on one side and on the other,

well, like they are faux design, their faux raison d'etre on one side is what purports to be "City Information." This one has some vague message about art in the loop. I'd probably rather see a streaming blog from the Mayor.

If we're going to put more stuff on our streets, make them the modern design that Chicagoans are so good at, not a faux imported older style.

Robert Stern, the New-York architect and Dean of the Yale School of Architecture designed Chicago's bus shelters. He told Bloomberg.com that his inspiration for them

"came from Otto Wagner, the Austrian architect of Vienna's art nouveau metro, and Joze Plecnik, a Slovenian who worked in Vienna and Prague.

At the time JCDecaux came to us in the late '90s, I'd been traveling in those places and seeing wonderful structures that fit well both in traditional settings and quite modern environments at the same time. Chicago is a bit like that, a mix of late 19th and early 20th century and contemporary architecture. That complementarity was on my mind.''